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Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
Tim Duncan saves the day as the Spurs hold off the Grizzlies in overtime
As the government tightens controls on informal financing that is widely used by entrepreneurs, a businesswoman in southern China has been sentenced to death on charges of defrauding investors. Lin Haiyan was convicted of “illegal fund-raising” for collecting 640 million yuan ($100 million) from ...
Maryland became the sixth state in as many years to abolish capital punishment Thursday when Gov. Martin O’Malley signed legislation repealing the death penalty. The new law could face a challenge at the ballot box next year, however. A group that has led successful ...
Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has announced a renewed push for the death penalty, as well as life sentences for rape, saying that “draconian” penalties were needed to tackle violent crime, local media reported Wednesday. O’Neill said the impoverished Pacific nation would ...
Two inmates are executed for conspiring to gun down two rival yakuza at a restaurant in Chiba in 2005.
Two inmates were hanged Friday in the second round of executions since Shinzo Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party returned to power in December. Put to death were yakuza Katsuji Hamasaki, 64, and Yoshihide Miyagi, 56, according to the Justice Ministry. They were convicted ...
Human rights group Amnesty International slammed Japan on Wednesday for resuming the use of capital punishment last year after a 20-month gap between executions. The previous, Democratic Party of Japan-led government resumed the use of capital punishment in March 2012, executing 10 people since ...
A 30-year-old man’s death sentence for the 2011 murder of a woman in Okayama has been finalized after he dropped his appeal, a branch of the Hiroshima High Court said Friday. Koichi Sumida, who was sentenced to death in February by the Okayama District ...
A man on trial for the gang rape and fatal beating of a student on a bus in New Delhi last December was found dead in his prison cell Monday, prompting fury from the victim’s family and accusations of murder. Officials at the maximum-security ...
In an unusual action that quickly sparked debate online, Chinese authorities showed a live broadcast Friday of four foreign drug smugglers in their last hours before execution for killing 13 fishermen. A shocking and apparently unprecedented form of reality TV for China, the program ...
The Liberal Democratic Party-led government appears reluctant to disclose the criteria under which it chose to execute three men Thursday, the first hangings since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took power in December. Some observers speculate that two of them were picked out of the ...
Three death-row inmates are hanged, in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, the first executions carried out under the new Liberal Democratic Party-led government.
Hiroto Oyama frequently dreams about his mother floating on the surface of water and his father standing on the gallows. “I wake up by my own shouting voice,” the 24-year-old Oyama said. His father, Kiyotaka Oyama, 51, was convicted of killing his wife (Hiroto ...